Tag: espionage

It’s not every day that you hear about spy missions that involve a lack of sex, but clearly parasitic wasps don’t pay much attention to Hollywood clichés.

These insects merge the thriller, science-fiction and horror genres, They lay their eggs inside other animals, turning them into slaves and living larders that are destined to be eaten inside-out by the developing grubs. To find their victims, they perform feats of espionage worthy of any secret agent, tapping into their mark’s communication lines, tailing them back to their homes and infiltrating their families.

Two species of parasitoid wasp – Trichogramma brassicae and Trichogramma evanescens – are particularly skilled at chemical espionage. They’ve learned to home in on sexual chemicals used by male cabbage white butterflies. After sex, a male coats the female with anti-aphrodisiac that turns off other suitors and protects the male’s sexual investment. These chemicals are signals from one male to another that say, “Buzz off, she’s taken.”

But the wasps can sense these chemicals. They feed on the nectar of the same plants that the cabbage white visit and when they do, the wasps jump her. They are tiny, smaller even than the butterfly’s eye (see the image below), and they hitch a ride to the site where she’ll lay her eggs. There, they lay their own eggs inside those of the butterfly. Amazingly, the wasps use the same trick for different species of cabbage white butterflies, which secrete very different anti-aphrodisiacs. They can even sense when the anti-aphrodisiacs are wafting among the general scent of a freshly mated female. It’s all part of a sophisticated “espionage-and-ride” strategy.